I was going to call this “please read the fine print” but the reality is that since we’re no longer dealing with printed words on paper, we’re no longer really talking about fine print.  We can make the font on our screen as large as we want it.  And those far-reaching terms are no longer being hidden in the middle of contracts in tiny print.  The information is there, in black-and-white, on the screen, in simple terms.

Almost like they actually want us to see it.  To see just how much information (and control over that information) we’re giving them.

Image: Bfishadow via Flickr

Yet they know that very few people read those contracts before they hit “agree.”

After all, it would take an average user 180 hours per year to read through all the terms and conditions for the sites he/she accesses.  Think about how many sites you go on daily.  Not just the ones where you’ve stored an account; every place you visit on the Web.

Gulp.

I think this is an important but uncomfortable topic.  My mind has been turning it over by myself for the last few days.  Now I’m dumping everything I’m thinking about on you.  I’ll also preface this by saying that I just finished the Hunger Games.  That may be clouding my thoughts.

Hopefully you’ll take the time to read through this post and join the conversation.

*******

A few nights ago, Josh and I watched the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply.  Josh jokingly told me about it, saying that it fed into my “it’s not paranoia if they actually are out to get you” mentality.  He’s teasing but I am someone who reads contracts very very seriously and obviously likes to discuss this a lot.

I think a lot about what I put on the Web as well as even in private communication such as email or text message.  Because it is scanned.  The Internet is archived.  It goes beyond our archived Tweets at the Library of Congress or the fact that it is impossible in most cases to actually remove an account in its entirety from a site such as Facebook.  It goes into the fact that even if it looks as if it’s gone, it’s really not gone.

For instance, when you permanently delete your account at Facebook, you are stopping yourself and other users from being able to access your information.  But what about Facebook itself?  Can they still access your information?  They are completely honest and open about it: yes.

• You will not be able to regain access to your account again.
• Most personally identifiable information associated with it is removed from our database. This includes information like your email address, mailing address, and IM screen name. Some personally identifiable information may remain, such as your name if you sent a message to someone else. [Most and some are vague terms, no?]
• Copies of some material (photos, notes, etc.) may remain in our servers for technical reasons, but this material is disassociated from any personal identifiers and completely inaccessible to other people using Facebook. [Note: While inaccessible to users, Facebook keeps these items of an indeterminate amount of time.  And as someone said in the film, anything that can be disassociated can also be reassociated down the line if the TOS changes, as if often does.]

See, I’m not being paranoid… right?  Okay, yes, I sound like I’m about to go off the grid, but please read on because the reality is that I DO have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a blog, email, etc.  I use TOS mostly to think about the way I use sites vs. not using them at all.  And at this point, as the twins move online, I’m thinking about it in overdrive as we try to teach them what to post, email, text, and what to save for face-to-face conversations.

*******

So what is my biggest fear that stems from thinking about the TOS of online sites and mobile devices?

Let’s start with this: once something goes out, you really don’t have a way of getting it back.  I’m not just talking about blog posts.  This is true for the pictures we send, the emails we write, our text messages, and even Siri searches.  If you think about that too long and hard, your stomach (if it’s like mine) will start hurting.  I mean, yes, we all practice circumspection, but how can we know what society will be like in the future?  Or how my own opinions will change?

Things that are neutral today could become a marker tomorrow.  All profiling has a first day of profiling; a moment beforehand where we’re not profiling, and all the moments afterward when we do.

See, gulp.

What if Candy Crushing becomes anathema in the future?

*******

Every blog post I write goes out in an RSS feed and gets delivered to blog readers.  If I delete the post, every reader subscribed to me still has a copy in their RSS-feed reader.  If I delete an image, it’s still there too.  My blog (like all of our blogs) has been archived by the Wayback Machine.  Mine has been archived 172 times.  Again, it means you can pretty much access it forever regardless of what I do on my end.

Not really a big deal on one hand because I mostly talk about Candy Crush.  But what if I wrote about more controversial topics than speckled doughnuts?

It’s more what I DON’T know that worries me since we all know that there is plenty that we don’t know.  It’s the stuff that pops up in the news.  It’s the TOS that change overnight without warning.  The stuff that we’ve all sort of assumed but still cringe when it’s confirmed.  How are they using my data?  Mostly to sell stuff to me or to sell stuff to others, by the way it sounds.  But these sites are collecting a shit-ton of data, and we — the users — are their assets.  That’s how the value of a company such as Facebook was decided before it went public: what are its assets?  People and their data.

Do they really need all of that information?  Or is any information valuable and thereby sell-able in the future?  Someone will want it.  So even if Facebook is only using it to target ads, how will the people they pass my information along to the future use it?

I am a careful Internet and mobile device user, but even I know that most of my caution is a moot point: the information is being collected.  Even if I opt-out of the online world, I still need to contend with three billion other ways my data is being collected from what I order at restaurants to what I buy with my credit card.  Is there any point in trying to hold onto a shred of privacy in a world that is somewhat determined to ensure that I have no privacy?

Maybe?

Should we hold particularly tightly to those shreds of privacy since we know they’re mostly an illusion?  And how tightly?

*******

The documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply is a little choppy.  Sometimes it felt a little more akin to a 20/20 special report than a movie.  Sometimes it veered a little too much into the mood music.  But still, it’s a good starting point to show the twins to drive home the idea that even their silly Siri conversations are being cataloged somewhere.  And all those data points, while made “anonymous” in theory, can easily be made deanonymized now by a little poking, or by the company itself down the road.

Knowing what someone searches for online is sort of like knowing their thoughts.  Like running your fingers through their brain.

I think a lot about how to make sure that I’m not giving more than I need to.  I start with other Internet users out there, and I don’t write things that I don’t feel okay posting and having out there for eternity.  It means that I don’t get to discuss things I’d love to unload off my chest and discuss.  I don’t put up pictures I’m not okay losing control of as they float through the back-end of various sites.  There are plenty of fun things I find that I’d love to post on Facebook or link to on Twitter, but I don’t.  Because I like to leave at least a few pieces of the puzzle missing?  Does it matter?

And then I think about the companies themselves.  I opt-out of a lot of fun things.

A good example is 23 and Me.  When I first heard about it, it sounded really cool.  Totally up my alley, especially as a health writer.  I’d personally love all that cool info, but the company has ties to Google, and we’ve already seen just how seriously Google takes my privacy.  As the new president of the board said in Forbes,

Selling kits to consumers is the first phase of that eventual outcome. That is the only aspect of the business model that we’ve announced so far.

Before I try out something potentially risky that provides even more than the normal shit-ton of information we leave on the average Facebook page, I do want to know the whole business model.  But even 23 and Me can’t possibly predict how valuable that information will be down the road or how someone with new technology in place will want to use it. And because they know that they can’t predict what sort of gold mine they’re sitting on, they hedge their bets with a pretty scary terms of service and privacy statement that they admit can change at any time:

23andMe may make changes to the TOS from time to time. When these changes are made, 23andMe will make a new copy of the TOS available on its website and any new additional terms will be made available to you from within, or through, the affected Services.

In other words, they can change the copy on their site.  They may or may not notify you if they change the language in one of the existing terms.  They will only notify you if they add new terms.  The onus is on the user to continuously check the TOS.  While this is true of many many sites, the sites I tend to use also have a huge user base so I generally hear within a very short period of time if a new TOS has been uploaded.  23 and Me just doesn’t have the user base nor the media watching it like a hawk.

What do I think is the worst that can happen?  I don’t even know.  I mean, so what if a company out there knows about my genes?  What if they tell others?  After all, my doctor has a sample of my DNA.

But I guess that’s my fear: the fact that I have so many questions.  I have no clue how it may or may not bite me in the ass in the future.

*******

If you’re one of those people who clicks “accept” without diving into the details, first and foremost, don’t panic.  I know that sounds ridiculous after I just spent the top portion of this post essentially fomenting you into a panic.  But don’t.  It’s never too late to gather information and change course.

The documentary is a good place to start.  It covers a lot of interesting topics:

• He points out the language you should be wary of in a TOS.
• He talks about how Google said in the past that cookies were anonymous, but changed their policy two years later to admit that they can (and will) turn over that information which isn’t really anonymous if presented with certain legal documents.
• The value of personal data, which is what makes Facebook one of the most valuable companies in the world.
• Companies have no incentive (except to retain users) to make your information private.  We may want them to out of common human decency, but the only way that data is actually valuable is if they can use it.  An example is how Google merged its services into one very valuable profile.
• Stored Communications Act and third party doctrine.
• The history of Carrier IQ software on phones.
• The concept of retroactive searches carried out on stored data and the construction of Bluffdale
• How Facebook changed its default settings over time…

This is a screenshot from the film of how the default settings looked on Facebook back in 2005.

The first ring is stuff you share with friends.  The second ring is friends of friends.  The third ring is all Facebook users.  The fourth ring is the entire Internet.  In other words, back in 2005, non-Facebook users could see nothing on Facebook.  Facebook users could see someone’s name, where they lived, their gender, and their networks.  By default, that is.  People could hide those details too.  The site was set up for friends of friends to be able to see your wall posts, photos, and friends unless you changed that setting.  But overall, if you didn’t quite get how to tweak the settings on Facebook, you weren’t revealing everything with the world.

This is the screenshot from 2010.  Still the default privacy settings.

In other words, you no longer need to be a fellow Facebook user to see… everything.  Literally everything except your contact info and birthday is part of the default privacy settings.  Of course, when they changed the privacy settings overnight without notice on Facebook in 2009, everyone’s information was public until they went back in and adjusted their settings.  We all claim that users would revolt if they pulled that again, but the fact is, how many people would leave Facebook when we know that so many other companies are forcing our private information into the public sphere?

I operate under the assumption that nothing is private on the Internet regardless of privacy settings.

*******

There are sites such as Terms of Service, Didn’t Read that break down some general information about various sites.  YouTube is a Class D (Class E is the worst, and Class A is the best).  Google is a Class C.  Soundcloud is a Class B.  Twitpic gets a lot of thumbs down with their Class E ranking.  Most of the sites are still without ranking since the website is a labour of love by a small team.  But you can still gather a lot of information from it.

Such as did you know that iCloud can “pre-screen, move, refuse, modify and/or remove Content at any time, without prior notice and in its sole discretion?”  Hope you have a backup.  To be fair, telling you to back up your own data is the next section of the TOS.  Or that Amazon’s “terms may be changed any time at their discretion, without notice to the user.”

Sigh.

*******

This is a very long post.  I know that.  But there is a lot that we need to talk about when it comes to how sites are collecting and using data.  Is there any solution?  Of course not.  But there is awareness.  And once you have awareness, you can set your own personal boundaries.

And then it’s our job as users to make sure that even if the sites change their own boundaries, that it affects us less than it could have because of the personal boundaries we put around not sharing our information.

So, what do you think?  Is there any point in trying to hold onto a shred of privacy in a world that is somewhat determined to ensure that we have no privacy?

Here are two more levels that people keep emailing me about — level 175 and 177 of Candy Crush.  For people who have already emailed me about these, I don’t think there is anything new in this post that I didn’t already tell you.  For everyone else, the tips are here if you want them.

I think a Worst Levels of Candy Crush list should be made, writing out all of the levels that people commonly get stuck on so people can know it’s not just them.  I am now hitting a point on the game where every level is taking several tries to get past, and some are taking many more than several…

Level 175

You have to move four ingredients down to the bottom.  You want to clear off the whipped cream, starting in either the middle or the bottom.  Don’t bother trying to clear from the top.  If you can’t make one match in the middle or the bottom when you start the game, don’t make a move.  Exit out (this only works on a mobile device) and re-open so you have a decent board to start from without using up one of your lives.  Looking at the board above, this one is really a toss-up over whether I’d start over.  You have that one space in the middle with three blues on the left-hand side.  I guess I’d play it out, mostly because there is only one other match and it’s at the top, so good chances of a reshuffle early on that will hopefully get you a better board.

After you’ve popped a few of those whipped creams away, make as many striped candies as possible.  They’ll clear the board and help the ingredients fall.

Level 177

This is one of those dreaded timed levels.  I hate these.  They make me tense.  And this one only has one minute.

Essentially, you need to break through that whipped cream and make the candies fall over to the right side.  Make as many vertical stripes as you can (by matching 4 horizontal candies of the same colour).  The first move I’d start with on the board above is that sweet block of four candies at the bottom.  Another option would be to use the two already touching the whipped cream and move that blue one above it on the left side down on block so it cracks those three across the bottom.

Once you get through the whipped cream, start making matches on the right side.  Make striped candies, even if you don’t explode them.  When your time runs out and it says “Sugar Crush,” it will give you extra points from all those stripped ones going off.

Here’s the thing; time is tight.  You may need to use my timer trick, which only works on a mobile device.  When you can’t instantly see a move, give yourself a break by double tapping the home button at the bottom of the device.  This pauses the timer and slides the game up on the screen to make room for the apps row at the bottom.  You can then scan the board for a moment and look for the best move that will net you the most points.  Then touch the screen to make that move and the screen will drop down and return to normal.

Currently: I’m on Level 184, and I’m happy to go backwards and explain how I did any board before that.  Sometimes it was stupid luck but other times, there was actual thought involved.  Let me know the level you’re struggling with.

Okay, I’ll bite.

There is a story going around of an infertile vegetarian who finally ate meat once she became pregnant after IVF and the media credits meat for her ability to carry her pregnancy.

This is the headline: “Vegetarian eats meat, falls pregnant with triplets.”

Unless “falling pregnant” includes doing three rounds of IVF to get pregnant and THEN eating meat, the meat had nothing to do with treating her infertility.  Whether it helped her to carry to term is unprovable.  Certainly a lot of protein is needed to carry a triplet pregnancy.  Even with twins, we had to resort to tricks such as “double the milk,” melting powdered milk into regular milk to up the protein content in the drink.

But meat isn’t the only way to get protein, and I would argue that it’s not even the easiest way to intake healthy protein.  It’s easier to open two lids — one for Greek yogurt with 17 grams of protein and another for a serving of peanuts with 24 grams of protein — for a 41 grams of protein meal vs. preparing a 30 grams of protein chicken breast when you’re already queasy and tired.  Yes, while eating meat may work for a certain person who doesn’t include a lot of other protein sources in their diet, vegetarian-heavy diets that are common in various religions and other parts of the world point to the fact that you don’t need to eat meat to have a baby.

I am so tired of the one-solution-fits-all presentation of ideas in the media.

But the thing is, giving up vegetarianism isn’t something she did because she was willing to do anything including choke down meat to carry her triplets.  The reason she started eating meat is that she had a craving:

“But then my hunger kicked in and despite never eating meat I craved it. I ate about six meals a day.”

She craved it in the same way that I craved banana bread during pregnancy even though I never ate it beforehand and haven’t eaten it since.  Similarly, the woman is back to being a vegetarian.

I think it rocks that this women did something that works for her, but the coverage of it is inane.  It is being treated as one more “just how far will you go to have that child of your dreams?”  Just how desperate are desperate people?  And if you’re not willing to do likewise (whatever that likewise may be: do IVF, adopt, eat meat), then the message is that you must not want it “enough.”

Mark my words: someone is going to have a blog post between now and Christmas where a family member suggests eating more meat in order to become pregnant.  Who wants to take me up on a bet?

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Twitter: the Party EVERYONE was Invited to” (Fox in the Hen House)
• “The Other Woman” (a guest post)
• “This is My Body, Sacred and Scarred” (Five Kids is A Lot of Kids)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Old Lady and No Baby has a post about announcing her pregnancy on Facebook.  After hesitating for a long time, she finally posted the news and got to experience the joy of a (very) long-awaited pregnancy announcement.  The post just made me smile.

Life As I Know It has a post about the blahs, as explained: “You know how when you get overwhelmed with life and you just can’t seem to come up with the words to purge your brain of all the insanity?”  I think it was the line about being tired of fighting all the time that got under my skin and made me nod.

A+ Effort (new name of an old blogger) has a post about how she chose the new name as well as how she chose the gold star for her avatar.  I like this post because I think too often we’re focused on judging ourselves (and others) by the end product and don’t take into account effort.  Effort counts for a lot; maybe even more than the big successes that come easily.

Similarly, Mama Asterisk (another old blogger in a new space) has a post about why she moved places.  I love love love this explanation for the new digs: “Because, you see, this blog is about me. And with the old blog focused on getting to my son, it was really his story. And I no longer feel comfortable telling his story to the world. His story belongs to him. This is my story. He may make some cameo appearances, but this space belongs to me.”

And continuing in that vein, If You Don’t Stand for Something has a post about missing her blog and needing her space.  Feeling unable to write, she takes those bottled up feelings into the face-to-face world.  I love it when she says: “When I woke up today, I just told myself to write anything, any feelings I had, just to put them to paper (er…tablet?) and get them out there and have faith that eventually the words would come again and the feeling of normalcy would slowly make its way back into my life.”  But really, it was this brilliant thought: “I feel like there are all these mountains and each one is something I’m trying to conquer: feeling ‘normal’ again, resolving our infertility, husband, work, family, friends. Each one is its own mountain and I’m trying to climb them all at once.” that made me love this post so much.  No one can climb multiple mountains at the same time, so if those extra problems aren’t like annoying mountain climbing partners, they need to wait their turn.  Glad she’s writing again.

MoJo Working has a post about having one foot in the infertile world and one foot in the pregnancy world and feeling out of sorts.  She writes: “That’s how I’m feeling these days. Like I’m in that shadowy no-mans land. Not happily ensconced in pregnancy, nor railing against infertility.”  I love this post because she so eloquently sums up what so many of us feel when we enter that state of disbelief, unable to give ourselves over fully since we’ve been burned before.

Lastly, Once a Mother has a very moving post on what should have been her daughter’s fifth birthday.  It’s a life that was lived in 28 days, but it is so clear from the love radiating from the words on the screen that Peyton’s mark in this world was enormous.  I couldn’t read this post without crying.

The roundup to the Roundup: Eating meat will [not] get you pregnant.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 30th and September 6th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I was bothered by the post telling girls to not post images of themselves in provocative poses online not because of the general statement that was made about teenage girls and the ways they present themselves, but because I was immediately worried about a specific girl; the girl (or girls) described in that post.

She doesn’t name her, but she describes her enough that a savvy reader from her town, a child who knows her sons, could probably figure out exactly which girl’s pictures became the tipping point for that post.  And now, that girl has been shamed in a very public manner.  Cyberbullied in a sense.  By an adult.  Who wanted to make a point about what she allows her child to see on his social media account.

The way to handle concerns about an image is to privately contact her parents.  To contact the child herself (after all, she gives the girl specific instructions to run to her account and delete the pictures — wouldn’t it have been easier to contact the child directly if she wanted that to happen?).

She could have sent a letter, made a phone call, asked the school to do a very non-specific school-wide assembly on Internet postings.  She could have even written the very same post without the focus being on the girls themselves, how they are posing, and what they are wearing.  She could have kept a tighter focus on her own actions as a parent.  If she hadn’t described specific images, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.

But she did.

And there is a child out there who might be feeling the effects of being discussed online.  There are people who know exactly which girl she is referencing.  And there are people out there who are spending the night trying to guess which girl she’s referencing and shaming other girls along the way.  There’s a bunch of kids in her son’s school who are getting a very hard lesson in what it means to be part of the online world.

That author’s post was judgmental.  Her tone wasn’t concern: “Wow – you sure took a bunch of selfies in your skimpy pj’s this summer!”  It was condescending.  It was shaming.  And that was what got under my skin: because no child is going to respond positively to that type of message.  Especially not done on a public stage.  And adults who care about getting a message across work to deliver it in a way that gets heard.

And frankly, the excuse of “but usually no one reads my blog” doesn’t hold up.  Anything and everything that we place on a public blog has the potential to be seen by a lot of people outside our small circle.  Including this post.  So if it does make it to that girl described in the picture, I just want to tell her that there were better ways for an adult to handle this situation.  And I hope you don’t learn from this that you should take shaming to the Internet rather than discussing problems in private or opening up public discussions with general terms rather than specific details.

After all, the author writes: “I know your family would not be thrilled at the thought of my teenage boys seeing you only in your towel.”  She knows them.  She can talk to them directly, rather than talking to all of us about this girl.  So please do.  Please — even now that you’ve publicly shamed this girl — please call her parents and talk about it with them.  If you do that, I’ll believe that you actually care about this girl too.

If you ever need to figure out what you should say publicly and what you should say privately, write the post and then imagine having to read it aloud to the subject of the post.  And if you can do that to their face and not feel embarrassed or pained at the expression they may wear, post it.  But if you gulp over realizing how your words will be heard, leave it in the draft folder or send it to them privately if you feel the words must be read.  By the way, to the author of that original post, I would totally feel comfortable reading this post aloud to your face, and that has everything to do with tone.

Last week I went white water rafting with my niece and father.  It had been 12 years since I last rafted on the river.  About 10 years since I had last kayaked since I gave it up during fertility treatments.  I tried on my water shoes the night before.  I slipped my feet inside and took a step.  The shoes were suddenly huge; my foot swimming in them.

“Oh my G-d, my foot shrunk since the last time I wore them.  That’s how long it’s been!  My foot is smaller,” I gasped at Josh.

“Is it possible that the material stretched?  It doesn’t seem very likely that your foot shrunk.”

“I’m telling you, look at my foot.  It is much smaller than the rubber sole.  Maybe the material stretched out, but the rubber sole didn’t change size.  I am shrinking.  I’m becoming ancient.  And when you become a shriveled old crone, your foot shrinks along with your gnarled hands.”

“Mel, are those my shoes?” Josh asked.

“Are they?”

“Well, they’re my size.”

A quick trip up to our bedroom determined that yes, those were Josh’s shoes.

*******

It felt odd to be out of my routine; driving towards West Virginia in the early morning.  I had been out of my routine all summer, and only back in my routine for a few days.  But still, it felt odd, as if I was playing hooky.  I turned off my phone and left everything behind, my pockets completely empty.

When I walked into the office where you sign in for your boat, the smell brought back such intense memories of being in college, between semesters and taking kids out on rafting field trips.  The guides were usually a year or two older than I was.  I came back so often that I got to know them each summer, hanging out in the gear room, flirting underneath the hanging life jackets.

My niece was a baby the last time I had been there.  I was getting married to Josh.  I had been away from the camp for many years, returning for this single summer to make some extra money to furnish our new apartment.  I felt awkward that I was several years older than the guides.  They could have been my camper, I thought to myself.  They could have been my student.

But now my thoughts were, you could be my kid.  I mean, yes, I would have had to have gotten pregnant at the beginning of college, but the age gap was now so large between myself and the guides that I could easily be their mother.

Their freakin’ mother.

*******

What I wanted much more than the rapids themselves were the stories.  A good guide will tell you how the various rapids got their name or tiny snippets of history as you travel down the river.  We got a good guide; a good story teller.  I got to hear for almost the 50th time how Bull Falls got its name, and remember navigating the two staircases with a boyfriend one summer, and bucking on White Horse.  And I said the same things I always said when I rode this stretch of the river, as if I were in a bucolic Rocky Horror Picture Show, shouting out the lines.

When we turned the bend in the river and saw the Mennen’s toilet powder sign on the rock, I waited for the guide to tell the story.  Except that for the first time on the trip, he wasn’t saying anything.  He was just looking around at the scenery.

Back when I was younger, I brought so many people to the Whitman Walker Clinic for HIV testing that I began being able to recite the 45 minute informational session that came with the saliva test.  One day, the man delivering the presentation skipped a few lines, and I immediately raised my hand and excitedly told him that he had missed one of my favourite parts.  And then proceeded to fill in the blank.  I really hate the idea of a story left partially unsaid, and that applies to HIV-testing informational sessions and trivia from the river.

“Aren’t you going to tell the story?” I asked.  “You know, of the Mennen’s toilet powder sign?”

The guide looked at me without saying anything.  So I finally had to admit that I had done this stretch of the river probably 48 times that I could remember.  “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked me.

Because I wanted to hear the stories.  It wasn’t a waste of time to hear them again.  You know how a kid wants to have you read the same story over and over again?  Or how you ask your parents to repeat family stories even after you have them memorized?  Well, the Shenandoah River is like a member of my family; it feels as corporal as a person, and it has shaped who I am as much as the people around me.  Hearing the stories about the various rapids was as enjoyable as recounting old family vacations from years past.

For a few moments, we each played coy, refusing to tell the other the story we knew about the advertisement on the rock face.  And then we both spilled, co-constructing the story as we passed over the rocks like water.

*******

Lori was surprised when I told her that I was white water rafting.  I’m sort of the last person you’d ever imagine enjoying white water.  I don’t go on roller coasters, don’t enjoy drops or heights or fast movements.  I got anxious on the freakin’ mail boat that one summer.

But for whatever reason, I like white water rafting.

A long time ago, I wrote a post about how everything I ever needed to know about navigating blogging I learned from kayaking.  I thought I had posted it, but when I looked to link to the post, it was still in draft form.  I have so many stories in draft form, unpublished.  Sometimes I don’t know what I’ve put up and what I’ve left to languish unread in that folder.

If I had posted it, she wouldn’t have been surprised.